Search This Blog

Subscribe to this blog

Get updates delivered to your email!

Of successful apps, and failures!

My last post on the cartoon mini golf game highlighted what I thought was my best game yet. Unfortunately, it was a total disaster in terms of getting downloads.

The mini golf game barely broke the 10k downloads mark at the end of the first 30 days.

Compare this against the football goalkeeper game which I did a case study on, it was really a disappointing achievement.

But that's the reality here. The mobile apps business is a real beast, and its really tough to tame it.

From what I've read, Supercell makes an estimated $1.3m from Clash of Clans daily. Their 2nd outing, Boom Beach makes about 10% of that ($130k daily). Guess, relatively speaking, Boom Beach isn't quite what they would call a success.

And really, what's there with Rovio besides Angry Birds (milked and reskinned to the max) ? It really looks like they are a 1-hit wonder (yes, yes, I know there are other games too, but they are no where near the pig killers).

The point is, I'm not picking on these great companies. If anything, I would love to achieve what they have. I'm just trying to highlight how this app space works.

One day you're flying high, and you decide to make it better the next round, and BANG! You're shot down. Its worse when its one of your better efforts, and when we are just a single developer with limited budget. There is NO guarantee that a better piece of work is gonna be more successful.

Since releasing the mini golf game, I've published a few more games. One is an infinite air race game (looks like its not even gonna break 2k downloads in 30 days).

And a couple of days ago, I published a cartoon themed football flick game ( where you flick footballs to a target in a cartoon setting world). This game started off pretty good from the looks of it. There is hope that this one might make it.

Will it repeat the performance of the goalkeeper game? I'm hoping it does, maybe even better than the other game. Hey, we can believe & hope!

So, if you've got a game that did not perform, or a disappointing app, dont feel down. It happens to all of us, even to the great masters.

The secret is, do you have what it takes to stay in the game long enough to see a difference being made?

When releasing a new app, it is understood that it will rank far down the food chain. After all, your app is new and unproven just yet.

What Google has done on the Play store is that they have given new app an opportunity to live, a chance to get to a more respectable place in the world of the unknown, the Google Play ranking algorithm.

Good looks go a long way in getting downloads for your apps. I'm a fan of looking out for beautiful app designs. I've looked at so many apps, gotten so much inspiration, but have yet to achieve anything that I can be proud of.

Blame genetics if you must. I am a developer, and although I play the guitar and love music and beautiful art and images (even tried photography once), I suck in the design area. I can give an idea, a design, but cant execute it. I'm a coder damnit!